Have Republican chances for takeover of Senate suddenly faded?

Thursday

Sep 4, 2014 at 12:15 PMSep 4, 2014 at 2:16 PM

The passing of Labor Day signals a shift into high gear by the special breed of political scientists whose jobs are devoted to intense analysis of poll figures in the mid-term election races — and the early September projections are somewhat varied.

While many prognosticators still see the likelihood of a Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate, a few of them are not so sure.

Consider, for example, THIS SITUATION at The Washington Post:

On July 15, Election Lab, The Post’s election model, gave Republicans an 86 percent chance of winning the six seats they needed to take over the Senate majority. Today — 50 days later — it gives Republicans only a 52 percent chance of winning the majority. So, how did the model go from predicting a sure-thing Republican majority to now calling the fight for the majority a statistical toss up?

Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium takes an even darker view of GOP prospects. His CURRENT PROJECTION gives Democrats an 85 percent chance of maintaining control of the Senate.

Meanwhile, Poll Explorer at DailyKos SEES a relatively modest chance of 56 percent that Democrats will hold the Senate.

And HERE‘s what analysts at Huffington Post are saying:

The race for control of the U.S. Senate remains very much in doubt, coming down to a coin flip based on current voter preferences as measured by the latest public polls. According to a new election forecasting model compiled by HuffPost Pollster and launched on Tuesday, Republicans have a 48 percent chance of taking control of the Senate. The outcome hinges on a handful of races where the poll-tracking model shows the Democratic and Republican candidates separated by less than 2 percentage points…The HuffPost Pollster forecast is slightly more optimistic about the Democrats’ chances than some other prominent news media forecasts, most notably those produced by The New York Times, The Washington Post and FiveThirtyEight, which calculate the probability of Republicans retaking the Senate at between 52 and 66 percent.

The passing of Labor Day signals a shift into high gear by the special breed of political scientists whose jobs are devoted to intense analysis of poll figures in the mid-term election races — and the early September projections are somewhat varied.

While many prognosticators still see the likelihood of a Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate, a few of them are not so sure.

Consider, for example, THIS SITUATION at The Washington Post:

On July 15, Election Lab, The Post’s election model, gave Republicans an 86 percent chance of winning the six seats they needed to take over the Senate majority. Today — 50 days later — it gives Republicans only a 52 percent chance of winning the majority. So, how did the model go from predicting a sure-thing Republican majority to now calling the fight for the majority a statistical toss up?

Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium takes an even darker view of GOP prospects. His CURRENT PROJECTION gives Democrats an 85 percent chance of maintaining control of the Senate.

Meanwhile, Poll Explorer at DailyKos SEES a relatively modest chance of 56 percent that Democrats will hold the Senate.

And HERE‘s what analysts at Huffington Post are saying:

The race for control of the U.S. Senate remains very much in doubt, coming down to a coin flip based on current voter preferences as measured by the latest public polls. According to a new election forecasting model compiled by HuffPost Pollster and launched on Tuesday, Republicans have a 48 percent chance of taking control of the Senate. The outcome hinges on a handful of races where the poll-tracking model shows the Democratic and Republican candidates separated by less than 2 percentage points…The HuffPost Pollster forecast is slightly more optimistic about the Democrats’ chances than some other prominent news media forecasts, most notably those produced by The New York Times, The Washington Post and FiveThirtyEight, which calculate the probability of Republicans retaking the Senate at between 52 and 66 percent.